The next Friday night, the meeting of the Occult’s Addict was staged in the theater of Chas' building. Juliet was the one to suggest it. Chas agreed to sing a set for them at the beginning of the night. Juliet asked him to do it specifically because she needed a favor from Fiona and she wanted to give her something she prized as payment. The only thing Fiona wanted was Chas, and lucky for Juliet, he was something she could give.
Seth and Nixie volunteered to sing as well. Nixie got permission to sing two songs ahead of Chas, but Seth was excluded.
“I need you to do other work. I want you focused.”
“What? I’m a siren. I can sing perfectly with no practice and come off as brilliant as an angel. Why wouldn’t I be allowed?”
Juliet amended her statement. “Because you’re mine and not for open display. Didn’t you know, I’m whoring Chas off in exchange for Fiona’s astral projection.”
He smiled and backed off. “If you put it that way. Why is Nixie singing?”
“The others are curious about her.”
In actuality, Juliet didn’t want to do the next operation that night. Seth had healed completely, so she guessed she had as well, probably faster than he had. Yet even though she hadn’t felt much of the pain her body felt because she was absent, she still felt nervous. Their first move had gone well, but Hades had the week they used to heal to come up with a strategy of his own. She told herself she wasn’t making a mistake, trying for more seeds so quickly.
Fiona and the others arrived at midnight like usual. Halona’s job was to help guide Fiona’s soul back to her body when the night was over. The witches didn’t really have a role to play, but Juliet was happy to have them anyway. They were especially eager to hear Chas and Nixie sing.
Paulo didn’t come. He said he wasn’t involved in Juliet’s problem anymore and he meant it.
Taylor came, too. Actually, she had spent all her free time that whole week at Chas’. She went to school, went to the hospital to check on Rylan, and then stayed at Chas’ as long as Juliet would allow, only going home to sleep. She did it because she believed there were only two places Hades might appear. One was back in Rylan’s body and the second was by Juliet’s side. So, she occupied a place on the couch without really moving, without really breathing. She was waiting.
When everyone was assembled in the theater, Juliet started the meeting. After the high of last week’s rigmarole, this gathering seemed anticlimactic. Juliet had Seth and Paulo do her first surgery in the Underworld because it was the one place she was certain Hades would not be. Since he had abandoned Rylan’s body, Hades could be anywhere, so no place was safe. At this meeting, she planned to leave Juliet’s body in the care of Fiona, and reclaim her divine body in the Underworld. If she could escape and meet Seth at the theater, she would have her second operation there. If not, she could at least check up on the condition of her body. All of which meant, the party would be less thrilling. The only interesting part would be the singing.
Nixie had gained energy and enthusiasm for entertaining since the previous week and had gone to great lengths to prepare the food. She was a carnivore, so there were chicken wings, beef jerky, bacon and shrimp kabobs. Juliet chuckled when she saw the setup. Clearly Nixie had never spent much time with women and didn’t understand that her choices were peculiar.
It didn’t matter.
Juliet started the meeting by asking how Rylan was doing.
“Well,” Taylor began, “he’s forgotten how to drive, all his usernames and passwords, his pin numbers, and his signature. He also has no idea about his taxable income for last year, what classes he was taking in university and every last thing our father taught him about the stock market. He spent the last two days in the hospital sneaking into his neighbor’s room so he could play Final Fantasy.”
“Do you think Hades has been back to see him?”
“No. I asked him privately about his encounters with Hades. He said Hades promised him he would go to heaven when he died if he let him borrow his body for an undetermined length of time.” Taylor sighed. “I had no idea my brother was so concerned about going to hell. Besides, now that he knows there’s no eternal punishment waiting for him, he’s a thousand times more despicable than when he was fifteen.”
“Sorry about that,” Juliet said, trying to sound sorry.
“Don’t say that,” Taylor snapped. “I got to have five glorious years without him and in his place the best br-br-person I have ever known.”
Juliet didn’t like Taylor’s way of talking. Not because she stumbled on the word brother not once, but twice, but because she thought Hades was a good person. Little blonde Taylor had only seen one tiny part of him, but Juliet decided to let it slide under the circumstances. Taylor hadn’t been told all the gory details of Hades’ behavior and Juliet wanted to keep it that way. After all, Taylor would make a better tool if she thought the best of the God of the Underworld.
“All the same,” Juliet said. “I’ll try my best to give you what you want. At the very least, one last time to talk with him. I can’t promise more. He has a mind of his own.”
Taylor nodded, but crossed her arms and dug her chin into her chest. She was unalterably moody, so Juliet moved on.
She approached Fiona and said, “Are you ready? I thought you might be willing to switch bodies before Nixie sings.”
“I’m ready,” Fiona said. She was clearly enjoying being the only necessary person there besides Seth.
He got up from his chair and gave Juliet some money. She sat down in a theater seat next to Fiona and put two coins under her tongue. One for the trip down, and the other was for the trip back up.
She kept her eyes open as she waited for Fiona’s spirit to leave her body. The last time it took her only a few minutes after she had listened carefully to Juliet’s instructions. This time she said that she didn’t need the lecture and that she could do it on her own. Juliet didn’t doubt this. If Fiona said she could do it than she probably could.
“She’s done,” Halona informed them.
With that, Persephone let her spirit loose from Juliet’s body.
***
In the Underworld, Persephone was surprised to see her immortal body lying peacefully on her bed. The bed had been remade and she had been changed out of her clothes into a V-necked shirt, stretch pants and a soft green wrap sweater. There were even slippers on her feet. Hades must have done this. He had even wrapped her wounds properly though he hadn’t added a healing balm.
Persephone frowned. This had to be a trap.
Before entering her body, she went from room to room, searching for Hades. Was he there? Was he waiting for her to come back?
After peeking around, she saw signs that he hadn’t been there in some time. The fountains were turned off—something he never allowed when he was home. When she went into the circular court for judging souls, she saw that he had done quite a few on his arrival, but it was clear from the souls in queue that he hadn’t been there in days. The last thing she wanted to check was the temperature of the bath. If the water was warm, he was coming back. If it was tepid, he wasn’t. It was unfortunate that Persephone couldn’t tell without a body.
So, she got into hers. She sat up in the bed. She wasn’t healed yet. Seth’s fangs were more dangerous than Hades’ scythe.
Aside from feeling the pain from her unhealed wounds, nothing catastrophic happened. Hades didn’t appear suddenly from behind a secret door. None of his minions materialized to take her into custody. There wasn’t even a note for her.
Maybe he didn’t think she would come back to claim her body so soon. In that case, it was smart of her not to wait, even though the pain in her abdomen was enough to make a grown man cry.
She pushed herself to her limits and forced herself to walk back through the palace to the river.
When she got to the bathroom, she knelt down and checked the water. It was cool.
Hades wasn’t coming back, not for a while.
***
Back at Chas', Persephone arrived after Nixie and Chas had finished singing. Everyone had been waiting around for an hour. Actually, they would normally have gone home, but all of them wanted to see Persephone in her own body, so they stayed.
When Chas brought her in, there was a reverent hush and respectful eyes. It was the awe she was entitled to and had experienced so little of.
She would have liked to let them look at her longer, but she feared being discovered again, so she asked Seth to take her into the room where their donors gave their blood.
When Fiona asked to come too, Seth refused her. “I’d rather you didn’t. What’s about to happen is a little personal,” he explained.
Once they were alone, he asked her about the condition of her body.
“I hurt dreadfully, but I think this was the best time to act. Hades did not expect it.”
Seth nodded. “Where do you want me to start?”
“My wrists. Those won’t be as difficult to remove as the one in my neck or the one in my heart, so please start there.”
***
The blood poured into Seth’s mouth as he broke the skin on her left wrist. His consciousness was flooded with memories from his past life.
He was standing behind a waterfall and the spray was in his eyes. He reached to rub them to try to clear his vision, but suddenly soft warm fingers covered his eyes from behind.
“Don’t tease me,” he yelled over the roar of the rushing water. Those were his words, but he secretly wanted her to tease him—desperately. “I have to get back.”
“To do what? Chop firewood? I’d rather you didn’t. Just spend all your time with me.”
He took her hands off his eyes and turned around to face her. It was Stella. Her face was so familiar, he felt his heart spring up at the sight of her. What was he supposed to do? But he was not there with her. It was only a memory. He cupped her face in his hand and said into her ear, “Don’t let go.” Wrapping her hands around his middle, he threw them both over the edge.
Her arms held him tightly.
And the world turned into water.
That was enough.
He sucked the seed out of the wound and spat it on the floor.
It was enough.
***
The blood from her right wrist tasted bitter and the quality of it was far out of the range of taste that Seth was accustomed to.
Persephone was lounging on a blue sofa in her underwater palace. He recognized the place immediately. She was reading a delicately bound book as the soft ripples from the water window reflected on her skin.
“Do you know what this is?” she asked as he approached.
He didn’t answer, because he didn’t even know how to read the words written on the cover. No one had ever taught him.
“It’s my book of dreams. I write down the visions I see when I’m asleep. I wonder if they mean anything.”
“What are they about?” he asked curiously.
“They’re about you, darling. Come. Sit next to me. I’ll read them out loud,” she said making room for him behind her.
He tucked himself in and rested her head against his chest as she started telling him about her beautiful dreams. His soul filled with unspeakable delight at the elegance of each one. He longed to kiss her. He longed to be with her forever.
Seth stopped.
He was losing his objectivity in the comfort of their past. He needed to stop. He needed to realize that the past was just broken promises. He needed to be here for now.
He spat the fourth seed on the floor.
***
Persephone felt a sense of elation as Seth wrapped her wrist. It was like she was staring down at the game she had started playing with Hades hundreds of years ago, and for the first time, she saw her tactics working. Erasing the first two months from her contract was unpredicted. Then, amazingly enough, they’d exceeded that. Now, with only two more seeds to go, she felt her courage rise and grow. She didn’t let her mind contemplate the difficulty with which the last seeds would be removed.
“Seth,” she said smiling through her heightened suffering. “This is nothing short of a miracle.”
Seth kept his lips pursed. His mouth was dripping gold blood. He wiped it with a white handkerchief and then asked shyly, “Now that we’re at the end, do you want me to do the one in your heart or the one in your neck?”
“My neck,” she replied. “Leave the one in my heart until last.”
“Are you cold?” Seth asked, reaching for a blanket.
“Yes. I’m cold,” she breathed, her eyes fixed on the light blue cabinets across the room, if only to have something to focus on other than her pain. It was rather like when she had woken up in the hospital bed after she took possession of Juliet’s body. Somehow the atmosphere was the same.
Seth covered her with the blanket and then he got her a glass of water. He put a straw in it and held it to her mouth so she could drink.
“I feel like a baby,” she said when he took it away from her lips.
“Really?” he said softly. “Well, you look like a car wreck, but a lovely one.”
“Thanks. You didn’t exactly look like a rose garden when you had my blood smeared all over your face.”
“What are you talking about? Women really go for the whole vampire look, or didn’t you know?”
She chuckled lightly in her throat at the joke he made at her. “Yeah, I guess I did know that.”
Seth laughed too and then bent to pick up the seeds he had spat on the floor.
During all the time that they had been working, the door had been kept closed, but just as Seth finished collecting the seeds, it swung open.
“Don’t come in,” Seth yelled, but whoever was on the other side had no concern for Seth’s words.
The door opened all the way and Hades entered. He didn’t look much like the God of the Underworld since he was dressed casually. He was wearing a black sweater with white shoulders and a white stripe across the bottom. Under his blue jeans he wore heavy-soled black boots. His white braid hung over his shoulder and his lips twisted into a frown as he approached them. It was his red eyes that gave him away.
Seth tried to stand in his way to protect Persephone from him, but Hades threw him out of his way with only a wave of his hand.
Persephone reclined in the hospital chair and stared at him with determined eyes. The pain in her wrists compounded with the aching in her stomach, and left her drained of all energy. She didn’t have a voice to say anything more than, “Hades, don’t.”
He didn’t listen to her and placed two fingers on her forehead. It felt like a band of silk spread itself across her forehead when he touched her. He moved his fingers down her face and body in a straight line to touch her abdomen. When his fingers lifted off, the ribbon became a net that spread across her whole face. As he placed his fingertips on her stomach, a new net sprouted and spread there. Then he touched her right shoulder and then her left. Persephone twitched. Her awareness was heightened as she felt, not saw, what was happening. Bands as delicate as spiders’ webs were tangling and tightening around her entire body. Not just her arms or her legs. These were not the kind of bands to keep her body still. They had another purpose as individual nets seemed to be growing and capturing each part of her body. There was a net around her tongue, others spread around the bones in her legs, one around her heart and others around each of the organs in her ribcage. As they permeated her body, she felt like every last bit of her was being caught individually and squeezed.
She screamed and just as she screamed the pain caused by the netting stopped.
Hades stepped back and regarded her reluctantly.
Persephone felt like crying. She didn’t even know he could do that. It was a different kind of magic than she had ever seen him use before. What had he done? She tried to push her soul out of her body, but couldn’t. Astral projection had always been easy for her, but now she felt as trapped in her body as if she were human. That was what he had done. He sealed her soul in her body, so she couldn’t go back to being Juliet. That road had been cut off.
“You’re too late!” Seth shouted to Hades as he pulled himself to his feet. “We already removed another two seeds.”
He didn’t know what Hades had done.
Hades regarded Seth as an insect. “Do you think I care about that? She’s still bound to the Underworld with the last two seeds. My letting her go to Olympus for half the year was a courtesy of mine.” He turned and looked at Persephone with bitter, cold eyes. “And it’s one that will not be extended again. It looks like they’ll have to find a new Goddess of Fertility, because when I’m through, you will no longer be available. You can concentrate on being the Goddess of the Underworld, my wife,” he said, looking her in the face. “Oh, and you should know, Zeus owes someone else a favor.”
She gasped.
He stepped one step closer to her, so that the edges of her fingers beyond her bloodied wrist brushed his knee. “You said that you couldn’t operate both sides of the circle of life. If all that’s stopping us from being together is your position on Olympus, then I’ll see you are removed from it. I don’t care about the power of controlling all sides of life. I never did. It was only a pretense I used to explain why I wanted you. It was all a lie. I only ever wanted you. So, if you give up being the Goddess of Fertility, can you be mine?”
Persephone couldn’t answer. Her head hung in defeat.
Now she understood. He hadn’t been in the Underworld because he was outside Chas' building waiting for this very moment. He knew she wouldn’t attempt the next operation in the Underworld for fear he would appear and disrupt them. So, he stayed where Seth was and made it look like he had retreated, when in actuality, he was waiting on the battlefield. He had even waited until she was wounded, so he could carry her home without a fight and keep her in the Underworld as his captive forever.
Persephone couldn’t think anymore. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t even protest as Hades’ arms came around her and he carried her like a princess out of the room.
He passed through the theater on his way. Out of the corner of her eye, Persephone saw Taylor. She was running up to them and the expression on her face was unfathomable. If Persephone had to describe it she would have used the word shaken, except she knew Taylor’s feelings ran far deeper than that.
She came up behind them. “Hades, I want to talk to you.”
He stopped abruptly, turned around and looked down at her.
Taylor’s head hung low as she scratched her upper arm on one side nervously. It seemed like he was giving her a chance to say whatever she wanted. “I-I wish…” Taylor stuttered.
“I don’t know you,” he said blankly and pushed through the doors in front of him.
The desolation Persephone felt was overwhelming. Who was she kidding? Of course Taylor hadn’t meant anything to him.
The game was over.
He had won.